KDE 4.0 was officially released last week after extensive development. The long-awaited 4.0 release ushers in a new era for the popular open-source desktop environment and adds many intriguing new features and technologies. Unfortunately, the release comes with almost as many new bugs as it does features, and there is much work to be done before it sparkles like the 3.5.x series.

Did you ever get to struggle against your text editor’s random format feature while trying to write a document? Open Office may be a great project, but when you want to focus on the content, it can be annoying to have your editor format or unformat your text, seemingly at random.

AMOR stands for Automatic Machine Object Recognition. It is a toolbox built upon Orange which allows end-users as well as computer vision scientist to do object recognition. It features most of the standard object recognition algorithms (SIFT, SVM…).It provides several different characters who prance around your X screen doing tricks and giving you tips.

To continue my look at how non-profits and the free software community can engage, I’ve decided to look at some popular free software products and see how well they fit the need of an average charity—namely my employer. I’ll start with OpenOffice.org.

TV. We all watch it. Chances are you might have a DVR hooked up to your TV so you can watch it at any time. If you pay for cable or satellite access, you are probably getting a little tired of those bills as well. If you’re into the ‘net, get rid of those bills and get Miro.

The way we use the internet is changing. As well as using the web to buy books, clothes and CDs, download music, auction junk on eBay, book a holiday, and find out what's going on in the world, we're increasingly using it to form networks and connections and share our thoughts and media with the rest of the world.

Have you ever wanted to attend a webinar but quickly discovered that the web-conference service doesn't even support your operating system? This has happened to me several times and it irks me greatly! I always make sure to tell the company that they should switch their web-conferencing service to one that supports multiple platforms including Linux.

There are many occasions at which a user needs to use two computers at the same time, even with two different operating systems, all in the same desktop. One of the most annoying things that might happen is that you will need to use a different set of keyboard and mouse for each computer with the resulting waste of space on your table.

A peer-to-peer (P2P) computer network utilizes varied connectivity linking participants in a set of connections and the collective bandwidth of network members rather than the usual centralized resources where a fairly low number of servers provide the core value to a service or application. Peer-to-peer networks are usually used for connecting nodes via largely improvised connections.

Linux users unhappy with the GIMP image editor may want to take a look at Pixel, a cross platform image editing application, which more closely mirrors the behavior of Adobe Photoshop. Although Pixel isn't free in either sense of the word — a licensed copy will set you back $38 USD and the source is not available — in terms of ease-of-use Pixel trumps the Gimp on a number of levels.

In KDE4 they have changed the KControlCenter and named it System Settings. I found it to be easy to navigate and very intuitive. Lets start the visual review. The start page looks very similar to KControl of KDE3.

The Ubuntu desktop may look a little brown and boring to first-time Linux users but beneath that conservative skin lurks a powerhouse of desktop features just waiting to come out, if you are using Compiz Fusion. Here we look at five of the better Compiz features that actually make us more productive as well as looking good.

If you're finding DigiKam or F-Spot, two of the many photo organization and editing tools for Linux, a bit limiting you may want to give Lightzone a try. The software isn't free, and curiously, isn't available for purchase either, but judging by the 20-day demo version currently available, it could end up a serious contender in the hybrid photo editing/managing market.

The Ubuntu Media Centre Team have decided to use Elisa as their core infrastructure to push the free software media centre effort forward. Elisa is a open source cross-platform media centre, designed to be as simple to use as possible.

KDE 4.0.0 was released on Friday. For the KDE team, it represents a huge leap forward in many areas, one of them being that they didn't add a K onto the name of every new app. For once. But elsewhere, KDE 4 brings huge enhancements both on and under the surface.

I spent some time this evening with the KDE 4.0 LiveCD to see what all the hoopla was about. I have been excited to see all the new improvements in the long anticipated KDE 4.0, as I’m sure many of you have been. Below are some of my inital impressions after half-hour with the LiveCD.

My previous article, 10 things I hate about KDE 4 RC2, got a lot of unexpected attention. At Digg I was called a “damn fool”, “dumbass” (for some reason that guy thought I believed RC referred to Plasma) (?!) and an “idiot”. I apparently hurt developer feelings.

Whenever people discuss software that they would like to see ported to Linux, they mention desktop publishing (DTP) applications like Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress. But Linux already supports an application aimed at DTP users. Scribus is an open-source page layout program that runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Is it a viable alternative to proprietary products for professional production work?

The Linux desktop environment has made great strides in terms of usability in the past couple of years. In that light, I present Rhythmbox, an OpenSource music player ala iTunes for the Gnome desktop. Some of its features include an iTunes-style layout, search box, playlist management, podcast handling, and iPod integration. If you learned iTunes, using Rhythmbox will take only a slight adjustment, mostly involving a minimally different look-and-feel.

I wrote about the performance of KDE 4 some time ago, and I'd like to revisit it. After a few threads about debug builds and release builds on kde-core-devel I figured I was wrong in my previous entry, KDE 4 couldn't easily be build without debugging symbols. So my build WAS a debug build. But now it's possible to have it clean and fast, and I did indeed see an increase in performance when trying it.